ENDURANCE FOR HONOUR by James Aldridge

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The strained, resentful growl of the twin motors pushing the D H Dove up into a steep climb was a wavy echo of the last mechanical sounds he would probably ever hear. So neatly caught like this — in the cocked hat of a deserted sea, deserted desert, deserted sky — he could guess the rest. "If 1 do get out of it," he said with a frivolity that did not convince him or satisfy him at all, "I'll give flying away. I've absolutely had it this time." Somewhere under the wreckage of a perfectly good aeroplane was the only hope he might ever have of getting out of this wilderness. The only thing that puzzled him was why the strange twin-engine Dove had dipped over the desert to the north, had circled a blue hill in the desert, and then climbed off; not seeing him, not trying to see him, and perhaps not wanting to see him. Whoever was in the plane could not avoid no¬ticing the great puff of white smoke he had sent up by setting fire to the wing fabric soaked in petrol; but if they had seen him they surely would have come nearer and circled. They looked as if they had been making an approach to land near that blue hill, but when they saw his smoke they had flown off as quickly as their twin-engines could go. "Smugglers, no doubt," he told himself cynically. He could afford to be cynical. He was a smuggler himself. "Any real point to survival?" he was mumbling half-heartedly when the plane had finally disappeared. But he knew the answer. He had found what he was looking for in the wreckage. It was a booklet issued during the war to pilots regularly flying this route. He had originally saved it as a souvenir and brought it with him to Iraq. He thought its title a little too cheerful for its purpose: Forced landings and desert survival. An aid to walking home. "That ought to make it easy," he decided. He looked for and found a map in the pocket of the back cover. It showed all the positions where the R. A. F. had put down caches of emergency food, water, and other provisions in the Sinai. There ought to be at least two dumps marked between his position and the coast, if he could manage to find them, or i they were still hidden from the Bedu and not rotted by the sun. Even so, it was going to be a game of irony and chance. What was he going to say when he arrived at the Egyptian coastguard but on the tip of Mirza Mohamed, the nearest inhabited point and his best chance of sur¬ vival? Let him explain himself to the Egyptians, if he could. . "I'll look into that problem when I get there," he decided and pre¬pared for his journey, refusing to hurry, refusing to be absorbed into weariness by the heat, refusing to consider one flutter of panic. "I'm the original emotionless man," he said aloud — , "and I intend to stay that way. All I have to do now is survive." It seemed possible. He came from a long line of survivors: pre-' Norman Englishmen, West-country family. He supposed he was the last of a long feudal line which had won its dubious honours a little further to the north of here — Palestine, where one wild son of the Alwyns had assisted the Crusaders' rampage of Antioch and Tyre. "So it wouldn't be too much of a dirty trick of fate if I ended where they began," this Alwyn said. The family crest said: Endurance for Honour. This was also the price of the Crusades, when claims like that were valued at the sword's edge, at the heart's centre. He had abandoned them long ago himself. Too many proofs against them.